missile strike

When Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, we were at least certain that he didn’t want to go to war with Russia, and that, along with Hillary’s atrocious track record, made Trump the lesser of two evils. After he was inaugurated, we were confident that the days of American foreign intervention were over, but we were wrong. After an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria, Donald Trump decided to do the one thing we didn’t him to do – potentially start another fucking proxy war. On Thursday evening, Trump ordered a missile strike against an airfield in Syria from where the attack was supposedly conducted. All the more shocking is that President Trump, a man known for keeping his word, has decided to contradict his own stance on interventionism for the sake of appeasing the outraged. Never mind the fact that the “chemical weapons” narrative is flimsier than the Democrat National Committee’s excuses, and reeks of a false flag operation.

Now how did I come to that conclusion? Well, there’s a video that shows the “dead” victim of a sarin attack coming back to life (the same Twitter account has a few other interesting images for your consideration). I’ve read that reports of chemical weapons attacks from Syria tend to be unreliable, but then there’s the logical question. What does Bashar al-Assad, a man who has somehow managed to maintain power throughout the Syrian civil war thanks to foreign intervention, have to gain by gassing his own civilians?

Once that’s out of the way, you’ll probably come to conclusion that Assad has no interest in gassing his own citizens, as that would destroy nearly every alliance he has, leaving him a sitting duck in front of the rebels. That in mind, I think that either the attack was a hoax, or it wasn’t carried out by Syria. The Pentagon is already looking into the possibility of Russian involvement, but why would Russia frame one of its allies? In fact, what am I to make of this Daily Mail article dating back four years ago, suggesting a US backed plan to frame Assad for a chemical weapon attack, that was suspiciously deleted after the missile strikes?

While were here, I think it’s time to clear up my opinions of Assad, since I never did in this site. All I used to hear when I was a teenager is that Assad is a barbarous fiend who needs to be dealt with, but while he is a truly detestable individual, I oppose any effort by the West to remove Assad from power. The reason I oppose this is because this regime change philosophy has been done before in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, and the end result is that those countries have been adversely affected by our attempts at “liberating” them from tyranny, because as bad as the previous dictators were, they were keeping the Islamists at bay. After they were gotten rid of, the Islamists were there to the fill the power vacuum left behind by their more secular predecessors, and they did exactly that, and now we have ISIS to deal with.

Simply put it, if Assad is killed, then it will create a situation where either ISIS can takeover, or the capital could be taken over by the Free Syrian Army, who are themselves Islamists. Either way, now is the wrong time to get rid of Assad, and I wish people would study the situation more before giving into moral panic next time we bring up Assad at the dinner table.

Going back to the main point, I also believe that that Trump was being misled, either by people within his own administration, or by his daughter. Think about it for a moment. Two days before the missiles were launched, Trump’s daughter Ivanka posted this tweet:

“Heartbroken and outraged by the images coming out of Syria following the atrocious chemical attack yesterday.”

I think you can guess who this is going to work out. Daughter cries about something she saw on TV, and then Daddy makes her feel better by taking care of it. Cute. Also consider the fact that her husband, Jared Kushner, is a senior advisor to Donald Trump (take a good guess as to how he got there), and apparently competes with Steven Bannon for influence within the administration. Call it a hunch, but I think Trump was being misled or pressured into striking the Syrian airfield by people who have their own agendas, and given the track records of people like John McCain, who praised the strikes, this isn’t a total leap of faith. It’s ultimately pointless for him to try and prove it anyway, because even the neo-cons know that the Russia narrative is a scam. We know Trump is not under the thumb of Vladimir Putin, and we know that Russia didn’t hack the elections, so why should he have to prove anything to them?

Either way, will it ignite a potential war with Syria? I don’t particularly think so. I think this is basically Trump throwing the neo-cons a bone to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s not in bed with Russia, and that he’s not a complete isolationist. In fact, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that this may only be a single punitive act. If that’s true, I might be thankful, but I don’t think he should have done it in the first place, because I know the reasons for doing so are based on outright lies. In fact, this is the same kind of manipulation that led the US to a pointless war in Iraq.

I can only hope that Trump has no plans to go to war in Syria, because if he does, we will have to come to the realisation that the supposed anti-establishment candidate, who we thought would signal the end of regime change, will have decided to engage in yet more regime change, and therefore becoming another establishment President.